Mann and misrepresentations

In today’s post, I will return to my series on false claims in Mann’s lawsuit about supposed “exonerations”. ( For previous articles, see here ^). One of the most important misconduct allegations against Mann – the “amputation” of the Briffa reconstruction in IPCC TAR – was discussed recently by Judy Curry, who, in turn, covered Congressional testimony on the incident by John Christy, who had been a Lead Author of the same IPCC TAR chapter and whose recollections of the incident were both first-hand and vivid.

In one of the major graphics in the IPCC 2001 report, declining values of the Briffa reconstruction were deleted (“amputated” is Christy’s apt term), resulting in the figure giving a much greater rhetorical impression of consistency than really existed. This truncation of data had been known (and severely criticized) at Climate Audit long before Climategate. However, the incident came into an entirely new light with the release of the Climategate emails, which showed that senior IPCC officials had been concerned that the Briffa reconstruction (with its late 20th century decline) would “dilute the message” and that Mann was equally worried that showing the Briffa reconstruction would give “fodder to the skeptics”.

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Christy left out a further fundamental problem in the amputation: there was no disclosure of the amputation in the IPCC 2001 report itself.

The impropriety of deleting adverse data in an IPCC graphic was easily understood in the broader world of brokers, accountants, lawyers and fund managers and one on which there was negligible sympathy for excuses. Not only did this appear to be misconduct as far as the public was concerned, the deletion of adverse data in the IPCC graphic appeared to be an act of “omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” – one of the definitions (“falsification”) of academic misconduct in the NSF and other academic misconduct codes.

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”.

However, NONE of the inquiries conducted an investigation of the incident. Each, in turn, ignored or evaded the incident. I’ll examine the evasions in today’s post. Today’s post will open consideration of the EPA documents referred to in Mann’s pleadings, a topic that is not easily summarized. Today’s discussion of the EPA documents will only be a first bite.

Well the IPCC is a political organisation with a political agendas. One of them is to promote the political established UNFCCC. So they can’t print or say something that undermines their agendas/UNFCCC. In other words it’s just policy based crap.

So the adjusting of data and cheating is supported by the UNEP and radical environmentalists, WWF, Greenpeace etc because their political agendas to them is more important than being honest?

How much longer until Mickey can call the official career over, stop corrupting the next generation of would-be scientists, and “retire” with his academic pension to writing alarming books of the coming catastrophes that no one is forced to buy? As fast as the truth is coming out, he might have to do it soon.

In the same week as MBH98 was published I wrote an email on the ‘ClimateSkeptics’ circulation list. That email objected to the ‘hockeystick’ graph because the graph had an overlay of ‘thermometer’ data over the plotted ‘proxy’ data. This overlay was – I said – misleading because it was an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison: of course, I was not then aware of the ‘hide the decline’ (aka “Mike’s Nature trick”) issue.

Mann’s response consists solely of personal abuse against me and, importantly, it does not address the issue which I had raised immediately upon seeing the ‘hockeystick’ graph. Hence, I am certain that the graphical malpractice of the ‘hockeystick’ was both witting and deliberate.

On the other thread, about Holdren, was it true he was heard to say to President Obama something like ‘..if this denialism is right,[it’s not getting warmer] should we push Mann under a bus?’ They may not be joking?

9 May: UK Financial Times: Harry Eyres: Shout it from the rooftops
‘To what extent should climate scientists speak out in the debate on global warming?’
Certain climate scientists, such as James Hansen, long-time head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in Manhattan, and Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, have for many years rejected the idea that scientists should maintain an impartial position and avoid value-laden language or political posturing…
Michael Mann is another who believes, he wrote in The New York Times in January this year, that “it is no longer acceptable for scientists to remain on the sidelines”. In a sense his hand was forced, after a study he co-wrote in 1998, showing that the average warmth of the northern hemisphere had no precedent for at least 1,000 years, led to him being “hounded by elected officials” and “threatened with violence”. He makes a provocative parallel with the advice from the US Department of Homeland Security to citizens to report anything dangerous that they witness: “If you see something, say something.” Scientists, the overwhelming majority of them, can see a serious, ever-deepening threat: it is their responsibility to speak out…
One of the most intelligent repudiations of the idea that climate scientists are under a moral obligation to take up the role of advocates comes from Tamsin Edwards, an academic at the University of Bristol in the UK. As a climate scientist concerned about the environment, Edwards feels under pressure to be a political advocate. But she resists that pressure, believing “advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science”. Ultimately, she says, “I care more about restoring trust in science than about calling people to action.”
I respect Edwards for stating the position so clearly (she writes an excellent blog entitled All Models Are Wrong) but here I disagree with her, not on scientific grounds but on ethical ones…
Galileo, canny operator that he was, was still not content to sit on the sidelines…
Albert Einstein was another great scientist who did not let a concern for the purity of the scientific method stop him from using value-laden language, or from taking up sometimes controversial political positions…http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/be72e4fc-d50f-11e3-9187-00144feabdc0.html

from FT, About Harry Eyres:

Harry Eyres established the FT’s Slow Lane column, which celebrates the creative use of down-time, in January 2004. Before that in a varied journalistic career he was a theatre critic and arts writer for The Times (1987-1993), wine editor of Harpers & Queen (1989-1996), wine columnist for The Spectator (1984-1989) and the first and so far the only Poetry Editor of The Daily Express (1996-2001).
In addition to his journalistic work Harry Eyres is a published poet, editor of LSE Environment, the newsletter of LSE’s Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance…

10 May: Centre Daily Times:Megan Caldwell: Penn State professor, climate scientist continues to rack up awards for work
(Megan Caldwell is a Penn State journalism student)
UNIVERSITY PARK — Richard Alley’s office in Penn State’s Deike Building is no one-room affair — it’s four rooms long, each filled with scientific research books…
On April 27, Alley was presented with the National Academy of Sciences’ Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship award at the academy in Washington…
On April 26, Alley received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet Award at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Penn State distinguished professor of meteorology Michael Mann will also receive the award…http://www.centredaily.com/2014/05/10/4172311/penn-state-professor-climate-scientist.html?sp=/99/188/220/

Mann exhibited as a TAR lead author the characteristics of someone informing science outcome via pre-scientific premises. It is behavior expected of someone by the new concept of science; in which science is just a subjective servant of any currently fashionable ideology.

In addition to his massive and proven contribution to climate science, Mann serves an additional useful purpose in being the scapegoat for the obsessesive smearing and conspiracy theorizing of the likes of this site. It shows how very little the sceptics have (recently emphasised in neon bold by Spencer’s laughable Top Ten Sceptic arguments) when they are still trying to make capital out of a false accusation and some stolen emails from years ago.

This guys email is intentional deceipt. Our method, as you know, doesn’t include any “splicing of two different datasets”-this is a myth perptuated by Singer and his band of hired guns, who haven’t bothered to read our papers or the captions of the figures they like to mis-represent…

But I did not “mis-represent” anything. The caption of Figure 7 in MBH98 says:

Relationships of Northern Hemisphere mean (NH) temperature with three candidate forcings between 1610 and 1995. Panels, (top to bottom) as follows. ‘NH’, reconstructed NH temperature series from 1610–1980, updated with instrumental data from 1981–95.

Hence, as I said in my above post, I am certain that the graphical malpractice of the ‘hockeystick’ was both witting and deliberate. Furthermore, Michael Mann is not only a “bully”; his email which I have linked proves he is a liar who lies about his work.

John Whitman says:
“the characteristics of someone informing science outcome via pre-scientific premises. It is behavior expected of someone by the new concept of science; in which science is just a subjective servant of any currently fashionable ideology.”
Has this not been the case throughout human history? Seems to me that a cognitive prosthesis (ideology) of one form or another is in the nature of the human domesticate.

You saw it right, you called it right, others confirmed you were right, Climategate emails proved you were right: the hockey stick temperature chart in MHB98 is a fabricated lie knowingly created to mislead, and it was successful in achieving that aim.

The consequences flowing from this should be borne by those responsible for creating it and knowingly using it to cause a great many others other to lose time and treasure chasing CO2 unicorns. The list of co-conspirators may be large. This is not yet over.

Mike M, I will forgive you if you repent, and bring down this house of climate cards. You have the ability to do it. Please find the moral fibre to do what it right. It is important. Many lives depend on it. The forests and animal species of Indonesia and Malaysia are being destroyed by inane, subsidized bio-oil projects that are trying to ‘undo’ the human CO2 emissions that are causing precisely nothing harmful. It is so sad to see this happening, knowing that the whole industry is all based on false and trumped up evidence, hallmarked above all by that damned fake hockey stick chart bearing your name. If you do not, these consequences will, unavoidably, also bear your name.

The impropriety of deleting adverse data in an IPCC graphic was easily understood in the broader world of brokers, accountants, lawyers and fund managers….

Really what Mann has done is really worse than anything that the stock market crowd could do, because everywhere they have the disclaimer “Past performance is not a predictor of future performance” or similar, whereas Mann is promoting the idea that global warming is a straight line continuum and he deletes the conflicting data. Further, the financial community clearly understands correlation versus causation, for instance the correlation between short women’s skirts and stock market rise is often cited as a caution not to confuse correlation with cause. Mann uses an international body to attempt to extract money from the entire developed world. Mere brokers, accountants, lawyers and fund managers can’t compete with that kind of power.

@richardscourtney I made a comment at Steve’s place in support of your conclusions re: Mann and his graphical misrepresentations. However it appears to have placed me into moderation. For which I feel a bit grubby.

“Mann exhibited as a TAR lead author the characteristics of someone informing science outcome via pre-scientific premises. It is behavior expected of someone by the new concept of science; in which science is just a subjective servant of any currently fashionable ideology.”

Has this not been the case throughout human history? Seems to me that a cognitive prosthesis (ideology) of one form or another is in the nature of the human domesticate.

– – – – – – – – –

David Norman,

My premise is that man’s natural capacity to apply reason to reality (science) is secondary to existence (reality). No ideology is a prerequisite to reason applied to reality, any ideology is problematic to the attempt of objectivity in science.

Yes, there always have been ideologies well before there were modern sciences. Yet I call what is shown by Mann’s TAR lead author characteristics ‘a new concept of science’ because it is pinned to science so broadly in the philosophy of science within virtually all of academia globally. It is pinned intrinsically to the philosophy of post-modernism (of which Ravetz’s post-normal science is a consequence). Post-modern philosophy of science puts man’s mind first then reality as a consequent to it; therefore Mann’s TAR lead author characteristics indicate his science serving his pre-science premises (some ideology).

Thankyou for your support which – of course – I await leaving moderation so I can see it.

Please do not feel “grubby”. Steve is a good guy who does and has done much good work. But he likes to feel he is the ‘main man’ so tends to be dismissive of anything which he did not originate. Hence, his holding you in moderation is not surprising given the subject of your post.

Wait a while and (assuming it does not offend his site rules) after Steve has thought about it he will probably release your post.

Derek Dinger proclaims: “In addition to his massive and proven contribution to climate science, Mann serves an additional useful purpose in being the scapegoat for the obsessesive smearing and conspiracy theorizing of the likes of this site. It shows how very little the sceptics have (recently emphasised in neon bold by Spencer’s laughable Top Ten Sceptic arguments) when they are still trying to make capital out of a false accusation and some stolen emails from years ago.”

Mann is a trained mathematician, now publicly promoting a blatantly false vindication of his life’s work, helping a pure artifact (of proxy data re-dating to afford sudden data drop-off at the end) turn into news headlines. And he’s trying to sue those who point this out.

Can you honestly look at that plot of input data with no blade along with Mann’s support of it and really think you are on the right side of the debate? Since nobody in their right mind could do that, we have to assume you are a fellow scammer doing damage control.

There is a splice but there is also use of a dotted line to indicate it.

So, the Mann deliberately lied when he wrote

This guys email is intentional deceipt. Our method, as you know, doesn’t include any “splicing of two different datasets”-this is a myth perptuated by Singer and his band of hired guns, who haven’t bothered to read our papers or the captions of the figures they like to mis-represent…

All the spliced ‘thermometer’ data is above the ‘proxy’ data. This implies that the recent temperatures were higher than the temperatures at times of the proxy data. However, we now know that implication was false and resulted from difference between the two methods whose results were spliced (i.e. the ‘divergence problem’).

I pointed out that the two methods could not be compared and we now know that is true (i.e. the ‘divergence problem’). Mann wrote his abusive email to refute what I had said.

Question….since it was “discovered” that there was a problem with the more “recent” proxy data using tree rings (which is supposedly why Mann doesn’t use it after 1980) why wasn’t it widely and logically assumed by the scientific community that the same problem could very well apply to the “past” tree ring proxy data, therefore making the use of it in reconstructions a bad/flawed/stupid idea?

Derek Dinger says:
May 10, 2014 at 3:05 am
In addition to his massive and proven contribution to climate science, Mann serves an additional useful purpose in being the scapegoat for the obsessesive smearing and conspiracy theorizing of the likes of this site.

Question….since it was “discovered” that there was a problem with the more “recent” proxy data using tree rings (which is supposedly why Mann doesn’t use it after 1980) why wasn’t it widely and logically assumed by the scientific community that the same problem could very well apply to the “past” tree ring proxy data, therefore making the use of it in reconstructions a bad/flawed/stupid idea?

Those who did (including me) were ignored in the IPCC process and ‘shouted down’ on blogs.

The IPCC has dropped the MBH ‘hockey sticks’ but has not overtly rejected them.

Sycophants of Mann refuse to face reality (e.g. see the post from Derek Dinger at May 10, 2014 at 3:05 am in this thread) and still ‘shout down’ any who post the truth on blogs.

NikFromNYC:
“There is a splice but there is also use of a dotted line to indicate it.”

Yes, but the spliced version was used to calculate the “attribution correlations” (plotted in panel d of the figure). In my book that’s at least as bad as the trick (=spliced series was used to calculate the smoothed series) itself.

As posted at Steve M’s site, I noted that the tree ring proxy wasn’t just simply truncated, it was fraudulently given a sharp up-bend to coincide with trends coming forward from the “truncation”. This inflection is not seen in Briffa’s full graph showing the divergence. Scroll down a couple of clicks:

This is a graphic from one of my recent articles here at WUWT. It graphically illustrates your apples and oranges points.

Paleo proxy is a very coarse sieve through which annual and decadal real world instrumental data easily falls through.

As can be seen, the instrumental temperature is all over the place. However the 50 year centred paleo material dies not even pick up the extreme cold of the LIA that were measured by the instruments. So of course splicing an instrumental record onto a paleo record is going to show a dramatic variation -as it has done in the past-for example see 1690 to 1740.

Phil Jones examined this period and came to the conclusion that natural variability was much greater than he had hitherto believed.
tonyb

In my opinion the ‘climategate’ email involving me which has most importance was from me. It can be read here together with explanation of its importance.

As the link shows, even good reason to review the basis of the AGW-scare was ignored so it is not surprising that mere details about Mann’s supporting ‘evidence’ were not rejected. This is directly pertinent to questions such as those from Aphan in this thread.

Steve McIntyre’s last paragraph in his “Mann Misrepresents the EPA – Part 1:”

“Even more problematically – and this goes right back to the 1999 Climategate correspondence – the IPCC assessment had ceased to be independent of the underlying literature. At the time (fall 1999) when Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were discussing their worries that they might “dilute the message” or “give fodder to the skeptics”, the version of the Briffa reconstruction subsequently used in AR4 (and AR3) had not been published and, in the version sent to Mann in early October 1999, had not been truncated. The first truncation of the Briffa reconstruction in IPCC documents was in the AR3 First Order Draft (late October 1999). This truncated a version of the Briffa reconstruction that was not truncated in its archive (in connection with Jones et al 1998).”

The problem with the IPCC assessment is even deeper than Steve identified as “lack of independence from the underlying literature”. The deeper problem is the literature the IPCC leadership chose to be assessed positively was restricted to that generally supporting a pre-preferred assessment outcome which was structured into the IPCC’s charter.

John

NOTE: this was also posted at CA in the thread “Mann Misrepresents the EPA – Part 1:”

On April 26, Alley received the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet Award at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Penn State distinguished professor of meteorology Michael Mann will also receive the award…

The National Center for Science Education is run by a bigshot in CSI[COP], publisher of Skeptical [I prefer “Scoftical”] Inquirer. What it means is that such capital-S Skeptic organizations are pscience-groupies, mere minions of the mainstream, claquers in the consensus, grazers in the herd of independent minds. As Anthony Standen wrote in Science Is a Sacred Cow,

“There are science teachers who actually claim that they teach “a healthy skepticism.” They do not. They teach a profound gullibility, and their dupes, trained not to think for themselves, will swallow any egregious rot, provided it is dressed up with long words and an affectation of objectivity to make it sound scientific.”

“Amputation” of contrary data seems to be the stock and trade of those promoting doom and gloom of climate change. And some leading journals seem to accept such partial truths further undermining our trust in the peer reviewed literature. Read How the American Meteorological Society Justified Publishing Half-Truths http://landscapesandcycles.net/American_Meterological_Society_half-truth.html

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I find the quote Dr. Keller apparently uses as a signature telling.
A scientist may realize what he has found will impact a “culture” but should he be using science to look for a way form the “culture” he desires?
I can see where “yes” could be a valid answer but not when the scientist distorts or rejects the honest science so as to promote his desired “culture” or his own ego.

If he only used one tree, it means little. Where was the tree growing for starters. Was it deciduous or an evergreen, they have different growth patterns. The distance between rings tend to indicate years that they did not have enough growth or more growth than previous years.

Coincidentally, Jacob Bronowski was the Director of the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) where I also worked. He made his BBC TV series while CRE Director. Becoming a TV personality gave him fame so he left for America where he conducted lecture tours.

Coincidentally, Jacob Bronowski was the Director of the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) where I also worked. He made his BBC TV series while CRE Director. Becoming a TV personality gave him fame so he left for America where he conducted lecture tours.

Richard

– – – – – – – –

richardscourtney,

When you sent your email in July 2000 to Chick Keller (Los Alamos National Laboratory) were you still employed or formally associated with the Coal Research Establishment (CRE)?

The reason I am asking is, by your publicly known CRE association or by your email address, could Mann (and team) have known of your CRE background and could that have contributed to their vehemence?